Here I sit, settled on the floor with a sweet blend of the dawn dew and morning mist – an aroma of calm and fragrance of familiarity. I sit in the coldness; I hold this hope warmly like a fire, a tender flame. My eyes behold the known handwriting on pages of worn journals and I read of exhaustion. Perhaps it is exhaustion of the weight of distance and discomfort. Or perhaps, it is an exhaustion of the pouring out – the extending of one’s soul. Or more, it is the longing for a place unseen, a greater hope yet realized – the heaviness of a broken world and the promise of a coming redemption.
Jesus, be our strength, our nourishment, our daily bread.
The months after my arrival in Uganda were months of unbecoming.
I unbecame all I had ever known or ever thought I knew. The perceptions I held were in opposition to the reality I was facing; the opinions I had once embraced were shaken at their core. While there was questioning of all that held both awe and wonder and newness and uncertainty, there was curiosity of even the unspoken - the hidden and webbed places of my heart, believing certain unearthly truths about myself and about God.
In 2020, amidst the COVID-19 lockdown and after somewhat of a dare I (less than graciously) accepted to read the Bible in a year. My throat was knotted when the invitation was offered:
If you want spiritual growth, read the entire Bible. Read it this year.
I felt angst not only at the thought of reading the entire Bible, but that there was a time expectation. The invitation was not only to read the Bible in ONE year, but to read it THIS year.
I initially resisted as I felt frustration build and my spirit puff up with pride. It felt less like an invitation and more like a provocation because the assumption presumed my spiritual maturity lacked having not read the entire Bible before.
And truthfully, it did.
I met Jesus in middle school at a summer camp. Before then, I had heard about God but only as a distant figure – an indescribable and unreachable Creator that heard our prayers and sometimes answered. I knew the God that I had heard of to be true and real because He did answer my prayer:
Once when I was nine I prayed to God to heal my cousin who was on life support and pronounced brain dead, and He did. Four months in a coma and he awoke with no memory of what had happened and with severe trauma to his body, but his mind was vibrantly alive again.
When I heard about Jesus, I knew He was the same God that answered my prayer all those years ago. I believed Jesus, but I was young and uninterested in wholeheartedly following Him. Throughout my youthful years, I was curious about the person of Jesus but more interested in who He claimed I was – a daughter of the Most High.
I was lukewarm – only invested in the pieces of Christianity that fit my life and lifestyle. So lukewarm, in fact, that although I was invited and encouraged many times to be baptized, I never accepted. I knew the risk – the cost of following Jesus. And I knew the significance of baptism as an outward expression of an inward transformation. Through baptism, I would die to my sin, accept His grace, and live out a life of faith having been born again. I would carry my cross daily and follow Him.
I met Jesus, but I did not follow Jesus. I believed He was the Christ, the Son of God, and I believed He had the capacity to make me a new creation, but my heart was hard and I did not surrender my life to the God I knew.
I sat in Bible studies throughout high school and the conversation always prevailed about priorities and the truth became evidently clear:
My priority was not Jesus. My priority was not reading the Bible or seeking God in the Scriptures. My priority was not devotion to the person of Jesus or the cause of Christianity, my priority was myself.
I claimed Christianity not because of Christ, but because of what it would benefit me. I did not love Jesus. I loved an idea of Jesus and an idea of myself in Jesus.
I did not love Jesus because I did not know Jesus.
My first year of college was a year-long stagnant curiosity wrestling with my faith and my earthly lusts and desires. I constantly thought and rethought my priorities – always finding myself and my desires central and commanding.
I stumbled upon a college ministry, the director was a friend of a friend, and began attending weekly. I was not only welcomed and invited with food and fellowship, I was regularly exposed to Biblical truth and encouraged in a life that actively sought Jesus and lived out faith.
I would meet frequently with two of the leaders. Little did I know then that they would become two of my best friends. They welcomed me as I was – broken and sinful, fully in need of Christ, and yet resisting God’s grace fully knowing what I would be required to surrender if I laid down my life to follow Him.
They answered every question, graciously loved me through my sin and pride and stubbornness and encouraged me in the beauty they saw within me. They loved and believed in me, but more than that they loved and believed in the God who created and formed me – the God who was endlessly pursuing me.
By the end of the year, after returning from my first mission trip with a group from the college ministry, I surrendered my life to the Lord. Wholly and raggedly loved, loved unto death, I was baptized with the Spirit – my sin dead with Christ in His death and my Spirit alive in Him in His resurrection. I counted the cost and followed Him. [1]
I surrendered my life and my priorities and began wholeheartedly giving myself to seek, know, and love God and love His people.
/ / /
In the Gospel of Mark, Mark recounts Jesus answering one of the scribes:
The first of all the commandments is: ‘Hear, O Israel, the LORD our God, the LORD is one. And you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ This is the first commandment. And the second, like it, is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these. [2]
And then in the Gospel of John, before Jesus’ betrayal, He gives His disciples a new commandment:
A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another. [3]
Today we read those words and they settle on the surface.
Of course, we think. Of course that is what Jesus said. That is the golden rule – a moral rule that all humans recognize as good and right – love other people.
But what Jesus spoke of wasn’t mundane or ordinary – it wasn’t commonplace love.
Jesus commanded love. He commands His love – love as I have loved you.
But if love is only a feeling, it can’t be commanded. So then love isn’t just a feeling, it is a deliberate action.
Not only does Jesus call us to lay our lives down at the foot of His cross and make every thought, every action, every feeling obedient and rendered unto God above for His glory, He makes the profound claim that we likewise should take every thought, action, and feeling captive and pour it out in love-service for others.
Jesus commands action, not feeling.
In Timothy Keller’s book, The Meaning of Marriage, he writes about love this way,
If you do not give up, but proceed to love the unlovely in a sustained way, they will eventually become lovely to you. [4]
When the feeling of love is lacking, it is produced in the action of love.
When I surrendered my life to Christ, I filled it with opportunity to serve and give myself on behalf of others. I filled it with the opportunity to act in love service. I had experienced the freedom and abundance of a life wholly given and surrendered to Christ, and in the abundance of the Spirit within me, I poured out.
I became a leader for the college ministry and led faithfully for the three remaining years of my time in college. I became involved in a local church, attending and participating in Sunday Schools, Young Adult Communities, and Women’s Bible Studies. I became a leader of a high school youth group, volunteered as a camp counselor at the camp where I met Jesus and eventually got baptized, and led backpacking and canoe trips through the Adirondack Wilderness as a guide and leader of a faith-based outdoor wilderness program.
I radically shared my faith as the only Christian in my major and engaged in meaningful conversations in secular atmospheres including coffee shops and homes with friends and strangers, in classrooms, offices, meetings, and street corners.
I poured in and poured out, and continually sought to know God more and more. So, after the well-intentioned invitation, hard-heartedly received, I accepted to read the Bible in a year. The year 2020.
And. It. Was. Transformational.
In all the years I had heard the countless stories, both of Old and New Testament, I experienced them. As I read, the mysteries and tales of the Old Testament built in anticipation for the coming Messiah, and I already had a sneak peek knowing how the story ends.
In the New Testament, Jesus became alive and vivid in my imagination. His words, actions, parables, teachings, and responses became a mirroring image of the Old Testament prophesies and the greater anticipation for the coming redemption - the new heaven and new earth.
I finished the book of Revelation early on a February morning the week before my birthday sitting in bed, anticipating the Ugandan sunrise, and as the book concluded I paused a moment and Jesus felt tangible. The accumulation of every inspired and God-breathed word and the wonder of the reality circled around me:
Jesus is alive.
Here.
Right now.
Every prophesy fulfilled, every promise kept – His grace, wholly free to us, His love abounding, and our eternities reconciled.
And these are the commands He leaves us with:
Love the Lord your God.
Love others as I have loved you.
Go, make disciples, teach them the commandments I have given you, and baptize them. [5]
Seek me and find me.
Be the light and the salt of the earth.
Feed my lambs. Tend my sheep. Feed my sheep.
And lo, I am with you always. [6]
In my meekness and exhaustion, in the pouring out and the giving of myself, I was unbecoming. I was learning to feed on that which was not my own strength, but that of the One who dwells within me.
As I anticipated my move across the oceans to a foreign land, I stored God's word in my heart and prepared for the newness of the unknown.
A few months before my departure, I had a dream.
As if a glimpse in time, I watched as gold dripped. It was being melted. From what it had come from, I did not see or know – it was just a formless mold of gold. I was seeing through my own eyes as a pour of gold was flowing down. I had this unearthing feeling that although I didn’t know what it would become, I knew it was being prepared for something. It would be made, in a special and unique way, into what I could not yet behold.
When I awoke peace rested within me. I knew the melting gold was me. It was what had begun and what would continue:
It was unbecoming.
Raw gold, melted, refined, and redeemed.
Grace.
So when I sat in my hard-stoned room – the cold floor on my bare feet, a wicker chair pulled to the edge of the barred window as the evening breeze cooled the heated plastered walls of the room nestled in the hillside of the pearl of Africa, I was not surprised at the unbecoming.
I looked out across the plains – the orange trees, the kids playing just beyond in the itchy grass, and below them the valley of the banana plantation and the fields beyond of maize trickled with mud-hutted homes.
I held the phone close to my ear as I listened to the response of my rattled and shaken exhaustion.
I was becoming undone and sheer exhaustion unhinged every neatly stitched seam of my heart. All that I had once taken as mine did not belong to me: the food I was eating, the clothes I was wearing, the body I was bathing, the hearts of those around me that I was loving, and the heart within me, wholly weary and broken. I would give it all, set it at the foot of the cross daily and beg nourishment.
The Word in my heart seeped in these broken places. I knew the Nourishment.
Take the bread, My body given for you.
And the wine, My blood sacrificed for you.
Eat daily of this bread. This grace. My yoke.
These are the promises of the Lord.
Christ took the bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. [7]
He breaks and gives His life to the broken. And in communion, kiononia - the broken get to live given to Him. . . Communion is always more than an intimate service; it's ultimately being given in intimate service to Him. We are made partakers (koinonia) of Christ and the divine nature, and He comes in a radical act of koinonia and makes His home tending to our aching places. [8]
I breathed out exhaustion and I breathed in grace. I breathed out the weary, tired, and heavy burdened and I breathed in the unbecoming.
I held the words at the other end of the phone:
Nicole, daily you feed yourself. Daily you feed others. Eat enough Bread to satisfy both.
Oswald Chambers writes it this way:
Exhaustion means that the vital forces are worn right out. Spiritual exhaustion never comes through sin but only through service, and whether or not you are exhausted will depend upon where you get your supplies. Jesus said to Peter - "Feed My sheep," but He gave him nothing to feed them with. The process of being made broken bread and poured-out wine means that you have to be the nourishment for other souls until they learn to feed on God . . . We owe it to God to be our best for His lambs and His sheep as well as for Himself. [9]
And then closely, a breeze as if a whisper: melt and be molded.
I was unbecoming.
I am unbecoming.
[1] Luke 14:26-35 [2] Mark 12: 29-31 and also Matthew 22: 37-39 [3] John 13:34 [4] Timothy Keller. The Meaning of Marriage, 109
[5] Mark 12: 29-31; John 13:34; Matthew 28:19-20
[6] Jeremiah 29:13 and Matthew 7:7-8; Matthew 5: 13-16; John 21: 15-17; Matthew 28:19-20 [7] Matthew 26: 26-27 [8] Ann Voskamp. The Broken Way, 48 - koinonia means communion or fellowship.
[9] Oswald Chambers. My Utmost for His Highest, February 9
Comments